kickstART.ca – crutchmaster

Accompanying the upcoming Paralympics a pretty interesting performance festival starts of in Vancouver as kickstart.ca with Crutchmaster Bill … and Bill Shannon is a lot of things: dancer, illustrator, actor, sculptor, multimedia artist, and skateboarder, to name a few. He’s perhaps best known for his unique dance style, however, which has earned him the nickname Crutchmaster: he incorporates sturdy metal objects that are associated more with broken limbs than graceful choreography. (link)>

In his own words: ” My obscure spatiotemporal and aesthetic artistic pursuits exist underneath a hovering massive and terrible freedom. It is a cold time now. That is the background. I keep moving. I project heat. To stretch the unspoken moment between intent and action I attempt a neutral palette fitting to my identity. A delicate process. I fail often. What colors you will choose be they hopes, fears or indifference are yours to place upon me or hold back. You, the random pedestrian laugh, cry, smile, frown, hug, hold, spit, push and pull. I embrace you always. The stories that are told in the gestures of kindness, the fleeting moment of a laugh, the scuttle of an embarrassment, these are my treasures. On a microscale I have learned that in all contrasting and conflicting energies balance is possible in the most unexpected of ways. Humans before speaking, they moved. Body language was instinctively positioned. It is very difficult to position a body to convey a position other than what it physically is? I know this from experience. I trust it.” (link)